You could go a step further and talk about computer algorithms or mathematics in general. The only cost there is a pen and a piece of paper. The only cost there is your own time. Some experiments and analyses cost more than others, it's just the nature of things.
Similarly, if you're trying to get a novel battery chemistry to outperform a Tesla car battery or generate a completely novel solar cell, you're not going to be able to accomplish that as an IC researcher. As you point out, there could easily be interim projects along the way to identify various interesting properties that might be useful to your long term goal which aligns with my original statement. When that's out of scope you partner with institutions with access to those resources whether those are big corporations, research institutes, or particle accelerators.
So, nope, bad example. Taking an existing process and giving it a few tweaks will push it around in parameter space, improving something we care about (number of cycles before 80%, let's say), often at the expense of something else, like you can't apply as many coulombs. Congratulations, you've got a thesis. And there are dozens of basic battery processes.
Research in high energy physics (cold fusion is a sub-category), is difficult to cobble together on small amounts however. That's why you see profs and labs banding together to raise sufficient resources just for a couple of experiments. And unfortunately for LENR, a great deal of money was spent in the 50s to 70s with no appreciable outcomes, therefore the funding bodies have become jaded and cynical about continuing to fund further research. The area will likely see a resurgence once those board members retire and bright-eyed folks revisit the field.
Try bringing up the possibility that at least some small fraction of UFOs actually are extraterrestrial. We have a decent number of compelling radar/visual encounters that suggest something artificial with maneuvering and propulsion capabilities beyond anything we know how to achieve. They could be illusions, unknown natural phenomena, hoaxes, classified tech, or equipment failures, but they are anomalies nonetheless.
The Fermi paradox really is a paradox, especially now that we've found planets in habitable zones orbiting stars within "reasonable" (less than a thousand years) distance if one were traveling at a meaningful fraction of the speed of light. One possible solution to the paradox that is always left off the table is "they are in fact here, they're just not making overt contact." There are numerous rational reasons that an intelligence would choose not to "land on the White House lawn" from planetary protection protocols akin to ours to self-interested concerns about triggering a violent response from the demonstrably violent and rapidly technologically advancing inhabitants of Earth. We'd be no threat to them now, but give us another few hundred years and we could be capable of e.g. sending a relativistic impactor their way.
But nope... the fact that the UFO topic is linked to fringe, new age, and wacky stuff means that it can't be discussed and must be absolutely dismissed. Also means that if someone wishes to discredit a topic, all they have to do is get new agey woo woo types to start talking about it.
This is just how humans think. We use ideas as signifiers of group membership and apply primate in-group / out-group behavior to them. Scientists are human, so science is not immune. IMHO this tendency is one of our species' greatest weaknesses.
I think it's more that the recent claims about the UFOs (moving at hypersonic speeds but leaving no emissions nor heating the atmosphere) are so implausible that they don't fit our current understanding of physics.
In any case a lack of heat is problematic. Even if they're using some unknown means of propulsion, the second law of thermodynamics is absolutely settled bedrock science. They must dump waste heat somewhere.
No we don't. We have radar readings that are anomalous, and that could be aliens ... or dozens of other mundane explanations that are each more likely.
Better to get the degree first, then start poking around the fringes.
It even answers the question "how to be happy?" (there are many "science-based" modern approaches sold in self-help books and the like)
modern science is basically a religion. there are even some "atheists" going around trying to get "religious people" to think critically and give up their superstitious beliefs.
granted, it's a more sophisticated social construction than old-world religion, but I base this claim in terms of their role and function.
This is the sort of response the doctor who suggested washing hands after surgery received and is not particularly useful.
To pick one of many, many examples. There are errors in both directions (dismissing correct ideas, accepting pseudoscience), and overly simplistically suggesting all iconoclasts should be entertained is probably unreasonable.
A Masters level education in Physics is not the time to be going off the beaten track; you still have 5 years or more before you even understand the territory enough to offer corrections on the map.
Replace “cold fusion” with “homeopathy”, do you still think your statement applies?
I think cold fusion is closer to homeopathy than stellar fusion.
For instance, the first sentence of the wikipedia entry for homeopathy: "Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine."
First sentence for cold fusion: "Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature."
The failures of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, or the fallout of that case, do not in my mind constitute pseudoscience. Skepticism notwithstanding, it is an actual area of research still funded by universities around the world - from wikipedia, as recently as 2015 "the Indian multidisciplinary journal Current Science published a special section devoted entirely to cold fusion related papers. https://web.archive.org/web/20170805185756/http://www.curren..."
I personally think it's more interesting than homeopathy or linking vaccines to autism. I think the research has yielded more tangible real world benefits, such as improvements to the sophistication of calorimeters. Furthermore, I think lack of reproducibility is not the same as proof of its impossibility or that it is pseudoscience.
Maybe it's my personal longing for a future with cold fusion speaking - and I don't think it's a good career move to focus on it - but I don't like seeing it dismissed in the same pile of detritus as homeopathy.
I'd happily retract that point and stick to the point around the professor's duty to keep their students from falling into intellectual quicksand or other impediments; I think that's the more important one anyway.
And I certainly agree that cold fusion would be revolutionary if it turns out to be physically possible. However based on my understanding, there's a solid body of nuclear physics -- both theory and experiment -- that show that this process is many orders of magnitude away from being activatable at room temperature. So I'd personally rather fund modern fission, hot fusion, and renewables as significant research targets.
It's not correct to say that all research into cold fusion (LENR as it's called now) is psuedoscience.
However, were I a professor, anybody who proposed LENR research to me would get a lecture: hey, there may be some interesting science in there, but you're gonna have to work harder than anybody else in the room to get people to trust your results. Some scientists don't mind signing up for spending 30 years proving their case, others want faster results, in which case you should find areas of research that are more likely to lead to accepted publications.
(1) https://muonsources.org/science-with-muons/how-are-muons-pro...
(2) https://cosmic.lbl.gov/SKliewer/Cosmic_Rays/Muons.htm#:~:tex....
If you want to see an example of this happening right now, look at how it's impossible to publish anything exploring a lab-origin hypothesis for Covid-19 in a peer-reviewed journal. Somehow that became heresy among virologists. Now maybe it has a natural origin, but you don't determine that by shutting down the conversation.
If you stop and think for a second, one must admit it's a rather large coincidence that this disease begins in the same city as the world's pre-eminent lab not just studying SARS coronaviruses, but actually conducting gain of function experiments with them. Now perhaps that's just a coincidence, but knowing nothing else, a-priori your assumption must be to favor the lab origin hypothesis. Now that the seafood market origin hypothesis has been found unlikely, the case grows stronger for a lab origin. But you still can't publish a paper making that case.
Some interesting analysis of the evidence for an against on github: https://project-evidence.github.io/
A recent non-peer reviewed paper on the subject: https://zenodo.org/record/4028830
Comparing that to two times peer-reviewed paper made by NASA is insulting, and your captatio benevolentiae will not trick the user into considering them to be on the same level or tied to similar fundamental issues.
The paper itself may turn out to be seriously flawed as your link suggests. But I think it's important to have the conversation.
How do we "look at" that?
An absence of peer-reviewed articles in reputable journals could be an indicator that this is impossible due to a big conspiracy to hide the truth, but it's also exactly what you'd hope for if there is no good evidence for that hypothesis.
I don't think there is some grand conspiracy going on, just that the experts early on decided it's a natural origin and completely unrelated to the lab, without any evidence I might point out, and now there's a very real and all too human tendency to dismiss anything else as quackery. Whether or not this is actually the case here is debatable, but we know know it's all too common in science and elsewhere.
[1] Segreto, R. & Deigin, Y. Is considering a genetic manipulation origin for SARS CoV 2 a conspiracy theory that must be censored? Preprint (Researchgate)
[2] Robinson, C. Journals censor lab origin theory for SARS CoV 2: https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19475-journals-c...
No, that's BS. There is evidence, a quick Google search away, published in Nature back in March.
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/26/genomic-research-po...
Lab origin, to define the term clearly here, means a virus, natural or otherwise, that escaped a lab, likely by accident.
This is not farfetched, it happened with SARS-1 twice in Beijing: https://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_04_23/en/
It seems, just by the coincidental location of the emergence of SARS COV2 in Wuhan of all places, to be the most likely origin scenario, just on a probability standpoint.
Now the "debunked article" cites 89% similarity to a published strain, but that's hardly a smoking gun. That's not to say genetic analysis cannot constitute proof, however.
I think the problem is, if there ever was such a strain in the Wuhan lab or elsewhere, it's very likely that the evidence had been intentionally destroyed by now, making it unlikely we'll ever know the truth.
It's not like you can prove it didn't leak from a lab either, at least not unless you're lucky enough to find a very close match in nature somewhere.
In two possible directions. You'd still need additional evidence demonstrating it was lab --> nature, not nature --> lab.
> Now the "debunked article" cites 89% similarity to a published strain, but that's hardly a smoking gun.
Right, and virologists say citing 89% similarity is bogus, as that's actually substantial difference in genomes. It's evidence in the opposite direction asserted by the paper.
Yes.
> Right, and virologists say citing 89% similarity is bogus, as that's actually substantial difference in genomes.
The same virologists that were quick to say 96% similarity to the alleged previously discovered bat coronavirus named RaTG13 is significant? Is 89 to 96% such a big leap, or are they trying to have it both ways?